Jeepers Creepers II

Society's bootcamp, survival-of-the-fittest incubator, locus of abject fear: the school bus is a house of horrors even before you drop a scary monster on its roof. In the sequel to Salva's 2001 sleeper, a load of high school basketball players, cheerleaders and chaperones gets marooned on a silent stretch of road in the American heartland, where the ravenous Creeper (Breck) would rather nosh on gooseflesh than cornfields. 'Every 23rd spring, for 23 days, it gets to eat,' we're told - 'it' being a drooling gene-splice of Freddy Krueger, a supersize moth and a rotting fish, packaged in a mouldering Johnny Cash wardrobe. The opening scene finds him scavenging lunch in the form of a screaming farmer's kid, so a stranded bus should prove a meals-on-wheels bonanza. Salva ably colours in the racial and sexual tension between the anxious jocks; a Darwinian showdown beckons inside the bus while the evolutionary faux pas rattles around and tongues the windows. Despite perceptive casting, Jeepers II suffers from a surfeit of Creeper: the more you see, the less you flinch. JWin.